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Women in Love
by D. H. Lawrence
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Paperback
Publisher: Book-of-the-Month Club
Written in 1916, Women in Love brings to life the intimate attractions of a circle of friends and lovers and was described in an early review as an "analytical study of sexual depravity." Exploring the very nature of physical and emotional love, Lawrence masterfully intertwines the lives of the novel's principal characters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen (who were first introduced in Lawrence's The Rainbow) and their respective lovers, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. Perhaps owing its sources to real-life attachments that Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, shared with John Middleton Murry and his wife, Katherine Mansfield, the novel creates a startling, almost incantational mix of ideas, emotions, and symbolism. When Lawrence was unable to find a publisher for this, his favorite novel, it was privately printed in New York in 1920 and appeared in England a year later.
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| A Different Kind of War |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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D. H. Lawrence wrote WOMEN IN LOVE in 1916, when he was living in Cornwall, reviled for his pacifism and impoverished by prosecution of his previous book, THE RAINBOW, for pornography. Undaunted, Lawrence wrote a novel that virtually defies the war and continues to explore physical enjoyment as part of the relationship between men and women. But the physical is only a part of a prolonged psychological entanglement between the sexes that sometimes seems more a kind of warfare than traditional romantic courtship. The result is a challenging book, simultaneously of its time and out of it.
It is challenging in part because nobody's views are simple. Two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen, become attracted to two men, coal-mining heir Gerald Crich, and his friend Rupert Birkin. Birkin, a school inspector, is based on Lawrence himself, and he strives towards various ideals that confuse even him and may be quite unrealizable in practice. Indeed, the book might as well be called "Men in Love," since Lawrence spends at least as much time with his two men, and there is the added complication of strong homoerotic overtones that climax in the nude wrestling scene so memorably captured in the 1969 Ken Russell movie. But while the women initially dance around their emotions almost as much as the men, in the end it is their comparative clarity that bring the two affairs to their respective conclusions.
In her fine novel ZENNOR IN DARKNESS, Helen Dunmore portrayed Lawrence in Cornwall shadowed by the First World War. It was a surprise, therefore to find that the war is never mentioned in Lawrence's own book. Although mostly set in the English Midlands, its cultural context is European. Its last hundred pages take place in Austria, and its characters seem to drop into untranslated French, Italian, and especially German with some ease. Lawrence himself had spent some time in Germany before the war and his wife Frieda was German; writing in 1916, his insistence on the commonality of the two cultures was a pacifist response to the belligerent nationalism around him. Yet there is a psychological sense of impending catastrophe, as though simplicity had fled from human relationships, and the quick pulse of this English summer will never return with quite that passion, quite that ease.
Lawrence is continental also in his artistic taste. He almost never mentions a female character without describing the colors of her clothes: hat, skirt, sash, and always colored stockings. The hues are brilliant, going together in subtle harmonies set off by bold accents. One thinks of Matisse and other then-contemporary European painters -- not surprisingly since Gudrun herself is an artist. There are important encounters with art at several points in the book: Birkin's London flat-mate, like Picasso before him, collects African carvings, and a German expressionist sculptor called Loerke will become important in the final chapters. Indeed the aesthetic of expressionism is central to the book; the characters do not just feel things, they feel them in brilliant color, and any one emotion may immediately be replaced by its exact opposite. So a character may feel love at one moment and intense hatred the next. Despite opening with a grimy image of cabbage stalks coated in coal dust and ending in the pristine brilliance of unbroken snow, the emotional world of this novel is a garish roller-coaster ride in a night-time fairground hung with colored lights.
And that is ultimately the problem. Lawrence is so intense in his descriptions, so devoid of half-tones, so prone to using sexual imagery to describe encounters that may have little or no physical component at all, that one soon loses one's bearings and becomes exhausted. About a third of the way through, Ursula kisses Birkin "to show him she was no shallow prude." There is a "rushing of passion" and "soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her." In the next paragraph, "satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed," Birkin goes home. What on earth has happened? Perhaps not all one might think. There are plenty more such moments to come, for all four characters, and several returns to revulsion or even indifference, so that when Lawrence's metaphors actually do mean what they appear to indicate, it seems little more than we have heard before. Even with a writer famous for breaking the barriers of prudery, it can be hard almost a century later to extract the meaning of what he was actually saying.
Beyond the battlefront, war has a way of making us question moral and spiritual values. I found myself thinking of a very different writer, Ernest Hemingway, who in A FAREWELL TO ARMS plunged into the fighting that Lawrence utterly rejected. But he had that same fascination with obsessive self-examination that may ultimately say more about the period than who battled whom.
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| The tortures of love and relationships stripped raw |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I first read this book when required to in college. I did not appreciate it at all -I found it boring and hated it. However, since then I've lost track of how many times I've picked this book up in my life. Sometimes I re-read it in its entirety, and on others, only excerpts that were moving to me. This book is full of scenes and passages that are so pulling on emotions and stir such deep introspective thoughts that it's almost disturbing.
The story contains characters whose relationships are difficult to relate to, and yet, somehow are familiar at the same time. The passions are mostly emotional and under the surface even though there is sex and are lots of discussions about it.
In the very first chapter, one of the sisters, Gudren, feels "I shall know more of that man." From this scene on, it's torturous for both the characters and the reader as this is not a love story, but a story about what love does to people.
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| Glad To Be Done With It |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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This classic by D.H. Lawrence has been on my to-be-read list for probably twenty years. The best thing I can say about it is that it is off my list, finished, and I can move on to reading something I will enjoy more! I got so bogged down in the middle, I almost abandoned the project. I persisted to completion more out of stubbornness than faith that it would improve. Indeed the actual ending of complete disillusionment could in itself have been powerful, I suppose, if I had ever been made to like the characters to begin with.
The book gets at least two stars from me for the opulent use of embroidered language. His vocabulary was outstanding and he applied words in unique ways. Here is a list he often employed: abject, ineffable, ignominiously, turgid, obsequiously, suffused, lambent, solicitous, supple, abominable, sinuous, indomitable, etc. But I'll never again read the words laconic, sardonic or furtive without thinking of this author as they were used so often I wanted to scream! Indeed, he seemed to intentionally reuse words in a way that it became impossible for me to offer the book at least three stars for his agile writing ability.
Here are some bits to give you the flavor:
"fatal exultation"
"ecstasy of reduction"
"flowers of mud"
"ineffable rift"
"rhapsodic intensity"
"the darkness of his loins"
"all life is a rotary motion"
"a milestone of lurking memories"
"he looked shining, like sun on frost"
"The most normal people have the worst subterranean selves."
"a hard metallic wakefulness"
"into the unfolded navel of eternal snow"
"the rabbit ran around the courtyard like a furry meteorite"
"possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalization"
"You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so you are never contained, never confined, never dominated by the outside."
"The greatest power is one that is subtle and adjusts itself, not one which blindly attacks."
"To desire is better than to possess."
This book is set in a town of miners, and there Lawrence mines the human psyche's disconnection with society. It was written in 1920, just after WWI, when there was emotional turmoil and a sense of the meaninglessness of life. This is coupled with the beginnings of women's liberation, in a backdrop of modernization and industrialization that tended to in-humanize people. It is an intensely introspective and self-conscious work of vacillating, selfish characters who do not do much but examine themselves. I found the obtuse lack of plot, without action or story development difficult, but could have embraced that if I agreed with the symbolism, the insights into human character, and the general themes portrayed. I do not consider marriage to be an impediment to independence as I am both married and independent, and I would definitely argue his overt parallels between love and death. This unnecessarily verbose, ill-titled book, was censored in its day which is presumably how it got it's fame, but it is tame by today's standards. At best, I can acknowledge this book with it's conspicuously lyrical, narcissistic style, as a period piece of inner searching and disillusionment, and important to the history of literature.
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| Read The Cliff Notes And Move On |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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The title is a misnomer or possibly intended to be satirical. It could just have easily been entitled "Men In Love." Two sisters and their best friend suitors engage in a "battle of and between the sexes" set in pre-World War I Midlands England.
Riddled with symbolism and themes, the primary theme of the novel is defining what a committed, intimate relationship should entail--love, something less, something more, or something altogether different.
Birkin, one of the two male suitors, is Lawrence's alter ego. It is his position that he wants something on the other side of and beyond "love." He does not want "love-plus"; he wants something altogether different, something less human and bound by social mores. His stance sounds all noble and good. However, you soon realize that he is using it to justify marrying his chosen of the two sisters, Ursula, but have an ongoing intimate relationship with his best friend and suitor of the other sister. Forgive me, but I didn't buy it.
Many commentators comment that the prose style has not held up well over the years, is dated, and is hard to read. I agree. One piece of advice I would have given to the author: "Lose the adverbs."
The book is also famous for its censorship. Tame by today's standards, it does use flowery language that evokes an image of sex that is occurring in real-time, including between the two main male characters. That latter relationship probably sent the censors of the day over the top.
Sadly, while acknowledging its rightful importance in the history of English literature, I cannot recommend the book anymore than I would recommend reading Beowulf. Read the Cliff Notes and move on.
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| Intensely emotional but not for everybody |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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Scottish novelist Catherine Carswell stated that Women In Love is, "easy to read, but hard to understand." Certainly it is difficult to understand Lawrence, but the Amazon review by Robert Moore of another of his books (The Rainbow) does a good job of describing the essence of Lawrence's literary style. Moore states that there are four ways in which The Rainbow and Women in Love, which is really a sequel, are something new in literature. The first is the general absence of plot. In Lawrence people meet and interact but there is not much action or story development. Secondly, Lawrence instead focuses on character development and on a collection of characters rather than a single one. Thirdly, the characters are psychologically complex, illogical and filled with contrary emotions. Finally, Lawrence's novels are sensual, not just as some have concluded sexually erotic. Moore likes this style and gives the book 5 stars. Another reviewer, Glen Engel-Cox says something similar only with a negative attitude: "I simply could not put up with the seemingly endless vacillations of the characters, the souped-up descriptions of all that they thought, and the plodding story line." Engel-Cox gave it only 1 star. Thus in reading Lawrence one should be aware that one is not getting a great story, but insights into the complexities of human emotions.
It is also difficult to understand Lawrence without knowing something about his life and the times he lived in. He lived and wrote at the time of the First World War when Europe, after a period of optimism, scientific development and relative peace was plunged into a war made all the more horrible by the very technology that had fostered progress. Lawrence was greatly affected by this transformation. While many novels have an autobiographical aspect, this seems to be especially true of Lawrence. Sons and Lovers, for example, closely parallels his early life.
Women in Love centers around four characters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen who teach in a primary school, Rupert Birkin, a schools inspector and Gerald Crich, scion of a mine owner. The couples pair off, Ursula and Rupert and Gudrun and Gerald and the novel largely deals with their troubled relationships. The characters outlook on life is decidedly negative. Rupert, for example, muses that the world would be a better place if there were no human beings to spoil it. The climax of the book, while dramatic, reinforces this extreme negativity. Granted Lawrence was deeply affected by WWI and the end of the book includes a quote from Kaiser Wilhelm regretting the war. But the American Civil War was also a bloody, terrible event and there is no tomorrow-is-another-day-Scarlett O'Hara finish to Women in Love. Quite the contrary.
Having read Sons and Lovers and now Women in Love I will not read The Rainbow or other works by Lawrence. I tend to agree with Mr. Engel-Cox in liking an interesting story rather than character study and/or psychological musings. I also think the human condition is not as bad as Lawrence presents it. For that reason I am giving this book a 3 star rating, meaning that it may be very interesting for some people, but others will not like it.
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